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Message from Vice-President Vincent Meriton on the occasion of ICT Week |17 May 2018

‘Enabling the positive use of artificial intelligence for all’

 

Vice-President Vincent Meriton has said that artificial intelligence is set to become increasingly a key part of our everyday lives as it is taking centre stage in the provision of technological solutions in a wide range of areas and will be impacting people’s lives significantly.

This comes in Mr Meriton’s message on the occasion of ICT week.

The theme chosen this year by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) is ‘Enabling the positive use of artificial intelligence for all”.

Artificial intelligence or AI refers to the creation of intelligent hardware or software that are able to replicate "human" behaviours such as learning and problem solving, and does so without human intervention.

The potential of AI is being exploited and developed in order to bring about many opportunities and is expected to change economies and the society in general. AI has enormous potential to assist global efforts to address challenges as great as poverty, hunger, health, education, equality and the protection of our environment.

Mr Meriton said in the context of Seychelles, with the persistent human resource constraints and drive for automation through the use of ICT across all sectors as an integral part of the public sector reform programme of Result Based Management or RBM, we see the usage of AI as having real potential to further support the improvement of government service delivery. What has been undertaken so far through the implementation of E-Government gives us a good base to do this.

“Many of us are probably using AI in our everyday lives without even knowing it. Some examples of AI applications are the use of virtual personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana by individuals to help them perform various tasks on their PCs, tablets and smartphones. For the younger generation, they are aware of AI through video games whereby non player characters learn the player’s behaviour and respond accordingly, thus making the games more challenging. AI is also heavily used in social networking such as Facebook which automatically highlights faces on photos uploaded and suggests friends to tag. Facebook users in Seychelles surely would not have missed this AI application,” Mr Meriton said.

He stated that the unfolding of AI in Seychelleswill be an exciting time for the development of our country.

“In partnership with the private sector, government will continue to collaborate on introducing AI applications that will boost in a positive way our development, which all agree will have profound and far reaching effects for all,” said Mr Meriton.

 

 

 

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